New York City developing social—inclusion—style measure

Mark Levitan, the Director of Poverty Research at New York City’s Center for Economic Opportunity explains the city’s interest in a new measure of “well-being”. He’s talking about a measure of social inclusion, in addition to important fixes on the income measure.

The second thing [about the poverty measure] is that the threshold is designed to be what in technical terms is called an absolute standard of poverty. The best way to explain that is the relationship between the threshold and the economic mainstream. When the threshold was developed in the early 1960s, the threshold for a family of two adults and two children just about equaled one-half of median income for a family of two adults, two children. If you looked at the value of the threshold now, it’s less than a third of the median income for a family of that type. And so what’s happening is that the distance between the poor and the economic mainstream has been growing over time. But if we think of poverty as a sort of “biological definition” – you know, people have a certain set of needs in terms of nutrition, housing, clothing – then if those needs are met, well then they’re not poor.

But a democratic society will view poverty not simply in terms of biology but in terms of human beings being essentially social creatures. And that speaks to the ability of people to participate in society. A lot of us feel that as the poverty threshold moves further away from the mainstream, we lose that social element of poverty: the ability of people to participate in all the roles that people need to in this society. If most people in the society are getting their information by the Internet, not having access to the Internet cripples your ability to fully participate. Now you may have enough food to eat, you may be able to keep a roof over your head, but your ability to participate in your community, in the political life of your city, of your country, to understand what’s happening in your child’s school, because that information is being posted on the Internet, all these things are closed to you. And so the poverty threshold needs to reflect the rising standard of living in the society as well. A poverty threshold that was appropriate 40 years ago is no longer appropriate today.

This is terrific.

I’ve been critical of some aspects of the New York City approach, but remained hopeful about Mayor Bloomberg’s commitment to developing a more meaningful approach to issues of opportunity, employment, and equality. Mark’s remarks are a very promising start.